The present invention relates to data management systems.
Since the launch of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) in the early 1960s for the commercial airline industry, engineering techniques have been used to identify critical equipment and to develop optimized maintenance programs for complex asset structures, such as those first applied to the maintenance program of the Boeing 747. RCM is now used in all major industries and is suitable where equipment failure poses high safety, economic and environmental risks. Fundamental aspects of maintenance optimization include the determinations of which equipment is critical, how the asset structure is constructed, which objects have to be tracked, and which objects pose the greatest safety, economic and environmental risks.
In regulated industries (Aerospace, Chemical, etc.), companies often are required to track critical equipment. For most of the equipment, the decision whether to track a piece of equipment in a maintenance system is within the discretion and responsibility of the engineers and maintenance managers. A challenge for a company that starts a project to implement a maintenance management solution simply may be deciding upon the scope of the project, which depends in part on which pieces of equipment the company decides are critical and could be relevant for maintenance improvements. Even before the time at which an asset is installed, one may need to inquire: Should the asset be tracked individually as unique equipment, or not? If yes, is it necessary to track parts of the asset individually as sub-equipment? Due to the rapid changes in technology and the shortened life-cycle for high-tech equipment, the potential number of pieces to be tracked individually is growing very quickly.